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A review by dilby
The Theban Plays: Antigone, King Oidipous & Oidipous at Colonus by Sophocles, Ruby Blondell
“You must remember / That no one lives a life / Free from pain and suffering.”
Maybe it’s the fact that I just read Paul’s other book, or maybe it’s his very lucid translation for Hackett—probably both, honestly—but I have to say that I felt the intensity and human drama and thematic urgency of these plays more than ever before. The concept of hubris, which until now has seemed prescriptive and Aristotelian, has finally registered for me as the ur-anxiety arising from our species’s primordial split between “The Human” and “Everything Else.” These are plays that grapple with the immense power we seem to have over reality, setting it against the intuition that Nature (or whatever you prefer to call it) will ultimately envelop and supersede everything we create. Indeed, the elision between the gods and the environment in these plays (so much attention to our dependence on the land and the weather, so much dread at the idea of “pollution”) is positively ecocritical. The trilogy is almost posthumanist in its thorough and methodical deconstruction of rationality and individual accomplishment. And I cannot stress enough the narrative impact of beginning with Antigone and ending with Oedipus at Colonus—how the dramatic irony that looms over the second and third plays changes the stakes from “perhaps by making the right choices he can find redemption” to “how much punishment will he endure before he dies.”
I must say that while the questions of free will and narrative agency have always been nucleotides in the DNA of tragedy, I couldn’t help thinking about these ancient questions through the lens of recent(ish) neurologically-inflected complications of human agency; how so much of our lived experience is shaped by neurobiological particulars which are beyond our control. Am I one of the 1% of people who will develop schizophrenia? I hope not. This is not too different from Oedipus’s plea in Colonus to be spared punishment for his actions which were apparently predicted before he was born. “Before I was even conceived!” he says. It reminds me also of Peter Lorre’s (for me) universe-altering speech from the end of Fritz Lang’s M. The one which totally turns “justice” on its head and opens up a deep lamentation for our inability to un-break the world, despite everything else that we seem to be capable of.
Anyway, these plays are astonishing. I hope I get to see them in performance one day, preferably all three.
Maybe it’s the fact that I just read Paul’s other book, or maybe it’s his very lucid translation for Hackett—probably both, honestly—but I have to say that I felt the intensity and human drama and thematic urgency of these plays more than ever before. The concept of hubris, which until now has seemed prescriptive and Aristotelian, has finally registered for me as the ur-anxiety arising from our species’s primordial split between “The Human” and “Everything Else.” These are plays that grapple with the immense power we seem to have over reality, setting it against the intuition that Nature (or whatever you prefer to call it) will ultimately envelop and supersede everything we create. Indeed, the elision between the gods and the environment in these plays (so much attention to our dependence on the land and the weather, so much dread at the idea of “pollution”) is positively ecocritical. The trilogy is almost posthumanist in its thorough and methodical deconstruction of rationality and individual accomplishment. And I cannot stress enough the narrative impact of beginning with Antigone and ending with Oedipus at Colonus—how the dramatic irony that looms over the second and third plays changes the stakes from “perhaps by making the right choices he can find redemption” to “how much punishment will he endure before he dies.”
I must say that while the questions of free will and narrative agency have always been nucleotides in the DNA of tragedy, I couldn’t help thinking about these ancient questions through the lens of recent(ish) neurologically-inflected complications of human agency; how so much of our lived experience is shaped by neurobiological particulars which are beyond our control. Am I one of the 1% of people who will develop schizophrenia? I hope not. This is not too different from Oedipus’s plea in Colonus to be spared punishment for his actions which were apparently predicted before he was born. “Before I was even conceived!” he says. It reminds me also of Peter Lorre’s (for me) universe-altering speech from the end of Fritz Lang’s M. The one which totally turns “justice” on its head and opens up a deep lamentation for our inability to un-break the world, despite everything else that we seem to be capable of.
Anyway, these plays are astonishing. I hope I get to see them in performance one day, preferably all three.